2016

2016 was a funny year, initially it felt like more or less of a re-run of 2015 but then it just felt like it drifted away into a boring rehashing of Pbta systems and that most of the creative leap forwards were happing elsewhere, either in the form of lavish LARPs or the seeming explosion of boardgame Kickstarters of all different levels of complexity and granularity.

The good news was by the end of the year we had a surge of new games Kickstarting and a wave of deliveries for earlier Kickstarters. Life still exists in tabletop roleplaying for now.

Favourites

My favourite games this year were Soap Bubble by Joshua Fox, from the 200 Word roleplaying competition and Annex by John Keyworth.

Both games solved problems I had been interested in for a while. Soap Bubble deals with the duality of televisions shows where there are storylines within the show but importantly there is the drama in creating the show, in the case of Soap Bubble in particular between the performers.

Soap Bubble captures the duality in a super-simple way that I haven't seen before in a game.

Annex uses the hand signals devised by Occupy to facilitate debate in large public groups to find an unintrusive way of providing a lot of feedback to a single narrator which allows the game to create the feeling of being part of a conflicted hivemind.